A Princely Knave

by Philip Lindsay

  “I don’t want to die,” cried the prince suddenly, glaring at the three men as though he had been struck mad; and he was himself astonished by the shrillness of his voice, for he had had no intention of speaking.

  “No man wants to die,” said Heron. “You are young, sire, and strong. These uneasy thoughts should not be for you.”

  “It is because I am young and strong,” croaked the prince, “that I don’t want to die. Why should old men like you, so near the grave, be frightened of death? You feed the worms a year or two before you might have done; and that is all. But when you are young and strong, ay, then is life sweet and rich with promise; there’s so much to be done … But to die! I can’t believe it, I cannot.”

  “Death is far worse for the elderly,” groaned Skelton, “the weight of our sin being greater. How can I face God with my unclean soul? Deeply have I sinned, and often; the Lord forgive me for my lechery. I had not even hot blood to offer as excuse, only lust and curiosity. In my time, I have been a most tremendous sinner and a million years in the boiling pit would scarce be sufficient to cleanse me fit to smell in heaven. I cannot remember how many women I have known carnally, both wives and maids, for none were safe from me. I was born with a sweet tooth and I can remember — I assure you truly — the taste of my own mother’s milk, as though it were but yesterday, and the soft cushion that her white bosom made. Oft from my early years my poor father had to whip me, my mother wept, my sisters hung their heads and my brothers thought me the very devil, but none could cure me of this lechery. Like a sparrow was I and I had two wives and killed them both, alas, with over-cherishing. And now must I die for it, and, God forgive me, how could the holy Virgin care for such a salt beast who has robbed her Son of the many wives he might have had had I not stolen from them maidenheads, their sanction into paradise?”

  “Even in repentance must you boast, you goat?” scoffed Ashley. “As though this fondness for witless females were some doughty achievement of which a man needs be proud! As Heron is proud of the ruthless cupidity that made him wealthy by ruining others less cunning than himself until through greed he over-reached himself and had to run from a halter. Often have I wondered what it was you did, Master Heron, that made you also an outlaw.”

  “I am no outlaw. I was unfortunate,” growled Heron. “I quarrelled with the lawyer Dudley over the payment of a tax, a damned illegal tax; and those who quarrel with Dudley or Empson lay their necks close to the noose. That is the truth whatever lies you might have heard … And what of yourself … a scrivener, a scribbler, a writer of other men’s words, what did you do that you had to skip from home?”

  “What hundreds of others have done,” smiled Ashley. “I loved King Edward and his brother, Richard, and my opinions were not hidden. Master Caxton, the printer in Westminster, warned me. He was a great lover of King Richard to whom he had dedicated his book on chivalry, and he told me that I was to be accused of plotting treason. And after that, like you, Master Heron, I tarried not to argue but made off.” He sipped the ale, his eyes clouded with memories. “But, hey,” he cried, “here we sit like London crows or St. Anthony’s swine-routing in the muck of the kennels. The past is best forgotten. As the prince said: we three are old while he is young. Our time here is short and therefore should we cheerfully die; but he should be given many further years for happiness. We have robbed him of those years.”

  “We?” stuttered Heron. “What mean you — we?”

  “We three,” said Ashley, “with other ambitious or revengeful men. We, not Tydder, are this lad’s destroyers. It was to satisfy our hate of Tydder that we spurred him to the invasion. O, you may prattle of your loyalty to a dream of the White Rose, and no doubt you speak truth; but greater than your loyalty to any such dream lies hatred of your fellows, of those London aldermen and the extortioners Empson and Dudley, who drove you out of London.”

  “I’ll not listen to this!” shouted Heron. “My lord prince, do not listen to this liar! He is but an envious scribbler with a scabby soul. Such fellows are notorious for their hates and envies. They have not the wits with which to make money other than by scribble scribble scribbling. They think themselves cruelly cheated while they scribble scribble for a petty price. Such are the fellows who make lewd songs that apprentices might sing them and corrupt their masters’ wives and daughters; they are the enemies of governance, and when rebels gather, they sing the rimes they make to the flouting of the law. Such a one as that to prate of envy and of hatreds! What else drove him to rebellion?”

  Ashley would not be baited into answering. He smiled and turned away and saw that the prince was watching him with a yearning look like that of a child craving for reassurance in a falling world; and he could have wept at his powerlessness to help. He, equally with Heron and Skelton, was to blame because this pretty boy was doomed. They, older, more foolish, more rancorous, had misled the youth with talk of justice and of thrones easily taken. Why had they done this wicked thing? why had they not left him in his innocence, safe in obscurity? Heron and Skelton had been inspired by rage because in some fashion they had failed as merchants; but he … he had no reason to want a throne. Only a foolish dream had led him with memories of great kings; and he remembered having seen both Edward and Richard in Master Caxton’s workshop at the sign of the Red Pale, for the royal brothers had been great patrons of learning. Slim Richard he could remember as though he had seen him but yesterday, that kindly worried face with the sad eyes of one who pitied all the world.

  Love, yea, love, sighed Ashley, had turned him to rebellion against Tydder. Love of King Richard and horror of the great betrayal on Bosworth field. To see this unkingly Welshman with the soul of a usurer seated on the throne of the Plantagenets, last of the English kings, dispensing his injustice and his tyranny in the Star Chamber … that had been beyond his spirit’s bearing. Had he not run out of the country he would have assuredly been hanged before long, for the impulse to kill the usurper had grown so strong that he had feared to go near the palace lest temptation overcome his caution; and when the king within his bodyguard had ventured out of doors, he had shut his own doors in terror of acting foolishly.

  The world had become the devil’s world and wrong was accepted as right. This lad would have to pay cruelly for his follies. Poor innocent in another man’s gear, for he felt certain that he was not Edward’s legitimate son.

  In looks he was so like that king that often Ashley had forgotten doubts in adoration; but there was nothing extraordinary in such a likeness. Edward had acted the husband to countless women, his lecheries having been notorious, and many must be the girls and boys resembling him today. Most likely, the king had chanced on the lad’s mother, mayhap Warbeck’s wife — but she might have been anyone from a laundress to a duchess, for Edward had been generous in his impartiality — and the woman had found it impossible to deny her king when he had taken her into his arms, as he had taken so many women, and she had trembled to see the baby beckoning in his eyes …

  Messengers came with tidings to shake even Heron from his complacency. Tydder’s troops were moving fast. With the levies of South Wales, Gloucester, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Somerset and Dorset, Giles Daubenay was riding and marching against them. Under Lord Willoughby de Broke, a fleet was off the coast to cut off escape by sea. The Duke of Buckingham and other great men of the West Country, the Berkeleys, Paulets, Luttrells, Cheyneys, were riding to unite with the royal forces; and Sir Rhys ap Thomas had summoned his terrible Welsh levies. As they had feared, the failure in Exeter had obliterated their hopes, swinging the watching magnates towards Tydder. Not that Tydder himself was with the army, it never being his way to fight in the van, as Edward and Richard had always fought. He sent others out to kill while himself lurked in the rear, as he had lurked at Bosworth, yet even then the reckless Richard had almost hacked a way to him through the press of fighting men. Now he was again taking no risks but remained at Woodstock, letting the others do his quarrellin
g.

  In Exeter, the hated Empson had arrived with an offering of a thousand marks to those who would ride against Warbeck, the false prince. Hey! Tydder would even spend money to catch him! That must have broken the miser’s heart, if he had such a thing! He must be very afraid, chuckled Heron; but the others could not laugh with him, nor did his own loud laughter ring honestly. Helpless, not knowing what to do, as though meekly waiting to be slaughtered, they lay before Taunton, their great army every few minutes growing less as men stole off. Even Heron could not manage a smile when he rode out and saw his soldiers’ fear and dejection. He groaned and seemed to grow smaller in his dark gown while the prince and Skelton argued where they might best find refuge.

  “We must make haste,” chattered Skelton. “They might fall on us now, this night. Only twenty miles off! Mother of God, why have you deserted us! Twenty miles … it is no more to Glastonbury, and they will be mounted men. They’d hang us without trial if they caught us.”

  “I pray they do,” said Ashley. “A quick hanging’s better far than torture in the Tower.”

  “Master Ashley,” cried the prince, his eyes seeming enormous in the white, drawn face, “you are brave and wise and I can no longer even think. What would you have me do?”

  “Stand and fight,” cried Heron.

  “Take sanctuary, yarely,” urged Skelton.

  “You, Master Ashley, what do you say?” asked the prince again.

  “You cannot fight,” said Ashley with a wintry smile. “Your men have lost heart and we would be outnumbered. The enemy are trained men, well fed and strongly armed. To stand and fight would mean a massacre of helpless troops. Nor will sanctuary help you. Let us believe that Tydder is so tender towards the church’s rights that he’d not have us dragged out by our heels, whatever the bishops might say; but we’d have sanctuary only for forty days and forty nights. Forty days in which to feel our terrors multiply until we hanged ourselves or crawled out moaning for mercy.”

  “Then,” whispered the prince, “there is nothing we can do?”

  “We are alive,” said Ashley, “and that is much, indeed. We have all our limbs and our wits and why should we prove ourselves inferior to the wolf? We could turn outlaws, living like beasts in the New Forest, or we can put our trust in God and try to steal through to the coast. The Channel is not so narrow that Lord Willoughby’s ships can overlook each point of it. In Cornwall, you still have friends, my lord. Poor folk, ay; but loyal. Some of them might surely risk a boat to save their prince.”

  “Yea, yea,” cried the prince, his eye brightening. “You are right, master, and we are cowards. As you say, we are not dead and can yet hope. Let us to Michael’s Mount.”

  “What!” cried Heron. “Are you mad, sir! Michael’s Mount’s the first place they’d go seeking us. Keep far away from there.”

  “And leave my lady?” cried the prince. “By the splendour of God, Master Heron, I may be ready to surrender my throne but I’ll not surrender my wife for any man.”

  “She’ll not suffer. Tydder will treat her gently …”

  “If Tydder touches her, if that base bastard tries to cuckold me, I’ll creep into his palace somehow and I’ll slit his throat.”

  “Whatever the sins against the man,” smiled Ashley, “and they are many, God knows, he is not esteemed lecherous. There again is he unlike a king such as your noble father with whom, forsooth, only a madman would have left his wife alone. Your lady will be treated with respect, if only for Scotland’s sake, and doubtless returned there. If we can escape, later you can go seek her out. It would be death to do so now.”

  “It would be a cowardly deed,” said the prince, “to leave a woman while I ran away.”

  “Rather,” said Ashley, “would it be ungentle to carry her with you. Even if it proved possible to reach Michael’s Mount, even if you should be able to steal her from the castle there, it might mean mayhap many days and nights in an open boat; and she would reach France in soiled gear, lacking complexion-salves and such things that women use, and think herself shamed as only females can feel when having to face the world like Mother Eve without her Eden. She stands now in no danger. For her sake, sire, as well as for your own, leave her at St. Michael’s and think only of yourself.”

  “In all things have I failed,” sighed the prince. “Both as soldier and as lover am I shamed before the world.”

  He put his hands over his face but could find no further tears for weeping. Despair beyond tears bowed him in misery. Not the failure of his hopes of the crown so much as dread of what his lady would think and say about his conduct made his life seem not worth a rush. If Tydder could have promised him a quick death, gladly would he have knelt before the block; but to be dragged to prison like a felon, carried in a shameful cart, perhaps, to London that people might jeer at him and pelt him with stones and dung; and Katherine might see the man to whom she had opened her beauty’s secrets, bespattered, bemoiled, betrayed, bescumbered, bespawled, reviled, insulted, kicked and hit … O, that was a thought like a hot knife in his belly, making him. cry aloud as though to wake himself out of nightmare.

  “Let us begone, my friends, yarely, yarely,” he sobbed. “I will go mad with thinking on my disgrace. Let us away, so long as we are moving and there’s no time to think.”

  Shaking, he sprang to his feet and would have run into the night had not Ashley caught his arm.

  “My lord,” said Ashley, “we must not send panic amongst our troops. Stay here; I will summon the men-at-arms and have them ready to ride with us when we send word.”

  “All’s not over yet,” cried Heron. “There are the seamen who promised aid. They’ve already landed, I am told, and are on the coast. Once we reach them, we will be safe and can fight again.”

  “If we reach them,” sighed the prince; “if we fight again. I am weary of ‘ifs’. Although we breathe and talk and walk, we are already dead men here; yet you can talk of ‘ifs’ as though there were hopes left for us in this world. But better far would it be if we went on our knees in prayer than thought to run away to nowhere, to nowhere, nowhere … because is there nowhere to run to …”

  Before that cry, ending in a high pitch of terror, even Heron was silenced. It was the truth. Let them pretend, let them make plans and smile as though fortune still smiled on them, they were no better than dead men using hollow words and pretending to see into a future which they would never see.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THROUGH NIGHT TO DARKNESS

  FEW sanctuaries had such rights of protection as Beaulieu. These had been granted the abbot by Pope Innocent III in the reign of King John; and around the abbey clustered the small, dark, dingy town of thieves and rogues and absconding tradesmen beyond the fingers of the king’s law. As around Westminster Abbey and St. Martin’s le Grand in London, and various other sacred temples in the country, these outcast communities could remain safe so long as they did not harbour murderers or heretics. Therefore it was towards Beaulieu in Hampshire that the prince turned his horse that night of September 21 and galloped with Heron, Ashley and Skelton and sixty men-at-arms.

  They had no plans beyond the need to hide. Fear, not hope, rode with them and sweated in their hair. Once they were safe in Beaulieu they could draw breath and plot how to start the war again or how best to leave the country. Rumours had reached them of friends landing on the coast and of men shouting for King Richard; but there was no centre of rebellion. Groups here and there were calling for him but they lacked unity. The provost of Glasney, they heard, had been taken by one of these groups. That notorious tax-gatherer filling the king’s coffers with bloody coins sweated by poor men’s labour had been seized and dragged to Taunton and there, in the market-place, he had been slain, his body chopped into gobbets of meat to be tossed to the dogs and the crows or to be nailed on the city gates as warning to other extortioners and tax-collectors. But where now were those brave men? Nobody knew for certain; but
once he had reached sanctuary, the prince prayed, he might be able to send out messages and gather, mayhap, an army again. All, his future, his very life, rested in the hands of God.

  Yet he wanted no more armies, no more fighting. I am not a prince, he told himself bitterly: I am only poor Perkin Warbeck in prince’s feathers. I have been caressed by kings and have slept with an earl’s silk-skinned daughter who was as beautiful as Helen. Now must I pay for my mummery and I’ll pay any price that destiny demands so long as it is not torture …

  Fast though the horses galloped, they were not fast enough for the prince. As he rode, leaning forward as if to push the steed on with his knees, he sobbed with fear and he dared not look behind him to see what followed through the moonlight. So fast did he gallop that his council found it difficult to keep pace with him and the men-at-arms, being dressed in steel, were left so far behind that they were lost in the darkness and the howling of the winds. Almost was the prince glad of that, and he grinned angrily when Heron attempted to protest, trying to make him go more slowly. Those clanking clattering cumberous oafs blazing like silver under the moon had been a constant danger, proclaiming through the countryside that a small army passed. Everywhere, Tydder had his spies; one knew not whom to trust, and beyond doubt, whatever he did was heard or seen and tattled to the king. Now while he rode, they would be trying to close in on him like men at a hunt. By now, Daubenay would have moved from Glastonbury to follow the chase, and the western lords would have joined him; all the country would be up, wakeful, watchful, looking for him. The noisy horsemen having been lost in the night, greater was his chance of escaping to the coast after resting at Beaulieu. No one would suspect four men dressed like merchants. They would be seeking steel men, dangerous men …